slipped discs

Archi-Tectonics unveils an intersecting elliptical design for Hybrid Stadium to open the 2023 Asian Games in Hangzhou.

- Rebecca Lo

Cities have a love-hate relationship with international sporting events. On the plus side are the prestige the spectacle brings and the tourism dollars that its iconic stadiums draw. On the minus side is the infrastructure investment necessary for an extremely brief experience. Many municipal governments simply do not want to be saddled with white architectural elephants; they are not worth the newsfeed headliners.

Nevertheless, Chinese cities feel that world class sporting events can only be good: for its development, people and international cache. Over the past few decades, both the Olympics and Asian Games have been hosted by Chinese cities. Naturally, when Hangzhou welcomed international athletes in the fall of 2023, it needed its own version of the Birds' Nest. To that end, New York-based Archi-Tectonics won a 2018 competition to design the landmark stadium for the 2023 Asian Games.

green sponge

Ready to kick off the Games in September, the 35,000 sqm building is sited at the south end of a 47-hectare newly created eco park in the Gongshu district of Hangzhou. The capital of Zhejiang province has long been regarded as one of China's most beautiful cities, with an abundance of classic Chinese structures set against picturesque lakes.

Contemporary Hangzhou is known for its economic and e-commerce prowess, with many company headquarters including Alibaba interspersed within a population of 13 million. To accommodate its rapid development, much of the wetlands of the city’s outskirts have been replaced by skyscrapers. “The government took the opportunity of the Asian Games to create a new eco park as a green lung and exemplary implementation of the ‘sponge city’ concept (to retain, collect and filter rainwater for re-use in the stadium) for this fast developing neighbourhood,” explains Winka Dubbeldam, founding partner of Archi-Tectonics.